Range of BLE

RE: Range of BLE

Hung Bui — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 08:07:01 GMT

Hi NK,

Next time if you have question and if someone haven't asked the same question, please create a new one. Adding comment to an old question has a great chance that it will not be noticed and also this is not what we recommended.

Regarding your question:

1- No we haven't. The RF range depend largely on the environment. 50 feet line of sight in a large open environment should be achievable.

2- To achieve long range, you would need to include a RF Power Amplifier (PA). And the trade of is that this will draw more current.

If you have follow up question, I would suggest you to create a new case.

RE: Range of BLE

NK — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 17:37:23 GMT

Hi @Hung/Nordic, since this question is not closed, can I take the liberty of asking some of my own questions on the same topic:

Whether Nordic have performed any studies on indoor range for the use case where 2 NRF51822(s)are being used - one acting as BLE central & the other as BLE peripheral? If not, whether you think that 50 feet might be achievable indoors in the same use case?
This bluetooth.com link states that, "With Bluetooth v4.0, manufacturers may choose to optimize range to 200 feet and beyond, particularly for in-home sensor applications where longer range is a necessity." Could you share your thoughts on how one might be able to achieve such long distance range using NRF51822?

Thanks, NK

RE: Range of BLE

Hung Bui — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 16:10:58 GMT

Bluetooth Low Energy focused on application with the range of 10m indoor. Of course, there is no limit on the maximum range.

However, it's not possible to guarantee no packet drop, there could be many factor that affect the RF performance, especially interference from other 2.4GHz signal, such as Wifi.

We don't have a particular power amplifier to recommend, but any 2.4GHz power amplifier should help.

In addition, reducing the connection interval down to the minimum 7.5ms would help increase the sampling rate.

RE: Range of BLE

kjell bystedt — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 15:56:45 GMT

What distance could we we expect 30 m ? What type external power amplifier are you thinking about ? /Kjell

RE: Range of BLE

Hung Bui — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 15:19:05 GMT

@Kjell: Having no packet drop with the distance of 40m is quite unrealistic. Bluetooth Low Energy designed for short range, low data rate communication. So you may have to think of using an external power amplifier. But then more power consumption should be expected.

If the matching network is well tuned, changing it to the balun doesn't help improving the RF performance or the range. The main purpose of the balun is to have smaller footprint, and BOM.

RE: Range of BLE

kjell bystedt — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:35:38 GMT

Since we have problem with range the test above was using evaluation kit to evaluate the range antenna /connection parameter is same as nordic suggested for evalaution kit 50ohm and 10ms /sample

We wounder if we could achive a better range using st balun component? /Kjell

RE: Range of BLE

Hung Bui — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 13:43:55 GMT

Hi Kjell,

Could you let me know your connection parameters ?

Have you set Tx power to +4dBm using sd_ble_gap_tx_power_set ?

What is the master device you used for the test ?

Have you tuned the antenna to match with 50Ohm impedance ? You can refer to this white paper regarding antenna tuning.

If you haven't done that, you can send your schematic and layout for review, also you can send your prototype boards to our office in Trondheim, we can do the tuning here for you.

If privacy is concerned, you can create a support portal account on our website, and can submit a support ticket there.